Walhquist has reportedly denied that the Posetti quote is accurate, but it mustn’t be that hard to check with a conference full of journalists – surely someone was recording the conversation? Julie Posetti is a prolific twitter user and a journalism academic at the University of Canberra and I suspect she’d know a lot better than to misquote someone, even in a tweet. For the record, here’s a screenshot of the tweets surrounding the one that offended Mitchell:

Beyond the question of whether defamation has actually occured, the big story here is the recognition implicitly made by Chris Mitchell that commentary on Twitter is now a big deal!

Update 3 (Tuesday, 30 Nov 2010): Jonathon Holmes has posted ‘140 characters of legal nightmare’ on The Drum at it’s well worth reading as it highlights some of the legal complications that come from Twitter, real-time ‘reporting’ and the challenges of context and the way contexts shift.